


Don't You Think It's Kind of Cute?

by calculatingMinutiae



Series: The Ghost of Glimwood Tangle [15]
Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Fun with Ghost Logic, Gen, Ghost!Allister, Growing Up, Introspection, teenage!Allister
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:54:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22865905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calculatingMinutiae/pseuds/calculatingMinutiae
Summary: Route Six, 2023.Time marches on, and waits for no one.Allister feels left behind. Mimikyu tries to help.
Relationships: Mimikkyu | Mimikyu & Onion | Allister
Series: The Ghost of Glimwood Tangle [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1576204
Comments: 7
Kudos: 65





	Don't You Think It's Kind of Cute?

**Author's Note:**

> So apologies in advance for screwing up the chronology so much with this one, but A) I did not finish the first half of the tournament like I thought I would and B) this has been done since last month, more or less. I still plan on writing chapters taking place before this (several, in fact!) but here's a point we'll get to eventually. Maybe it's just birthday feelings, but part of me figures now is as good a time as any to get this out of my drafts.

They've been at this for seven years now, and Allister looks like he hasn't aged an hour. Logically, by birthright, he should be a bonafide adult. He's earned his spot at the big kids table, so to speak, but nobody else seems to see it that way. They see a basket case, a masked caricature of a person, _a child, Bea's baby brother._ It was nice at first, but he can't even toast the new year with the other gym leaders. He finds himself shielded from reality by feeble euphemisms, cutting out the curses lain in life by the living, and it's disingenuous. Everything is sterilized before it gets passed to him. _Clearly_ he can't handle knowing things as they are. Arceus forbid his innocent ears hear so much as _relationship talk,_ let alone ever learn that sex exists or that morality is more than Good and what gets you sent to H-e-double-hockey-sticks. It'd simply be too much.

He isn't particularly interested in those bits, anyway, except that they _are_ so forbidden. Perhaps it'd be nice to have a significant other someday, if only for the company, but he's come to accept that it won't ever happen. Not while he looks like this. Not even with all the progress he's made. He _should_ be old enough to drink or smoke or vote if he wanted. He should be grown enough to make an autonomous decision— just _an_ autonomous decision, good or bad or regrettable or not— but nobody will let him.

 _Of course,_ he has to remind himself, _you've been nine for ages. You should be used to this._

But something about it is different now. _He_ is different now, having actually bothered to live through this last decade and experience it head-on instead of sleepwalking through existence as roughly the same person who charged into the Fae's forest with no sense of self-preservation. He's been managing the gym, figuring out things like _marketing_ and _local economics_ and _public relations_ and _taxes_ (even though he doesn't enjoy a second of those things, for the most part, having to actually attend school and learn maths, and lord knows whatever doesn't come to him instantly is shoved into the corner of his brain he tends to ignore until further notice). He's seen gym leaders squabble with one another, and helped them through loss. They've all come together in efforts to protect the people of Galar from the resurgence of the Darkest Day, and yet they still look at him and still see not a strong leader, but a helpless child. He is not nine anymore. He hasn’t been nine for almost a decade.

 _It's just the way they try to express love and support,_ he tells himself over and over again, lying in the grass on the cliffside, looking up at the stars. Mimikyu scoffs beside him, feeling indignant on his behalf.

"No, really… I know it's because they care. If they didn't, they wouldn't bother to see me at all," he forces himself to chuckle. Mimikyu's disguise crumples in sympathetic disgust. He cannot keep up the gesture.

"Alright, alright…. What am I supposed to _do_ about it, then? It’s not their fault that it keeps me stuck this way. Far as anyone knows, 've got a condition."

_A condition that lets them tell you what you should and shouldn't be able to do? That tells you that you're worth less than they are, and that you're too stupid to decide things for yourself. Not to take care of yourself, or at least to think for yourself?_

"'Condition doesn't _let_ them do anything. That's all people," he sighs, watching his breath float up and condense in the chill of the night air. It swirls like mist before disappearing completely into nothing; it fascinates him, a hand finally corporeal enough to feel the wind when he raises it skyward. He can only imagine the cool rush of the breeze blowing through his fingers. It must be so _crisp_ , so _energizing,_ but he can never truly know. He has been at this for almost ten years, and he's still so captivated by basic sensation.

 _They don't look at you the same_ , Mimikyu dares to say, and all Allister can do is shrug.

"Their fault…. Their loss…."

_Doesn't it bother you?_

"Of course it does," he stops supporting his hand, letting its weight drop into lush green grass in a boneless heap. "But I can't change how they think. 'Can only control myself, and wait."

_Aren't you sick of waiting? You've been waiting forever._

"I'd rather be waiting forever for them to get sick of me."

… _Oh?_

"They think it's all an act… like a parlour trick, like I can just pick and choose on a dime to be _normal_ , like it's all some big charade for more press, and _their pity,_ like I'm a liar so good I even got myself in a thrall, and I don't. I don't want them to find out that I'm just. _Actually_ like this. That I have to try, real hard, to fake being on the same plane as they are. Nothing novel. Nothin' _special_. Somethin' that'll make them sad instead." He smiles, bitter, like biting into an apple core and severing the seeds. "'Cuz then I'm on my own again."

_Bea knows. Opal knows._

"I didn't have a choice in telling them, not really."

_And they've been helping you live with it, haven't they?_

"They don't understand it, though."

_But they try._

"And they're the rare few that would and will." 

_You should stand up for yourself more,_ Mimikyu says as she lays against his shoulder. _You're still human. They can't forget that._

"Don't always feel human, out there. 'S part of my whole, _thing_ isn't it? Mystery, and that."

_And that's fine. But when you get off the field you ought not stand by and let them treat you like you aren't still a person._

"I'm not."

_I don't believe that and neither do you._

"… It feels weak, though. I know I gotta speak up, _I know,_ but that doesn't mean they'll _listen_ , and even if they do it might not actually _end well…."_

_You're their gym leader. I can't promise you it'll go over perfect, but you've seen this town change the most out of everybody. Does it steps at a time._

" _A_ gym leader, that is. It's not even that bad, now, I've been handling it just fine, so…."

_Alright, what about the people after you, then? What if someone else has to feel this way, you're just gonna let them do it alone?_

"… Have I told you I hate it when you're right?"

 _Only a lot,_ Mimikyu squeaks as she so tends to do, relaxing as he picks her up for a hug. 

The two stay silent, watching the stars pass overhead. 

_Could you try evolving?_

“What? No, people don’t work that way, Mimi.”

_Yes they do, they metamorphose all the time! Your friends don’t look like they did when you took over the gym, do they? Humans just evolve very slowly. You’ve been evolving along with them, too, hardly seems fair you shouldn’t look the part._

“Mimi, I _literally_ cannot do that. I’m dead, dead things don’t grow anymore.”

_You’re a ghost. Ghosts grow. You’ve gotten so much more confident and clever, remember when you got an A on your presentation? ‘Cuz I do. Tiny Allister would’ve never!_

That gets him to smile, at least.

_Ghost pokemon evolve, and they do it really fast and dramatic-like. They rearrange their molecules, and that. You can swap between being corporeal and not, I don’t see why you couldn’t…._

He stares up at the stars. They don’t offer him any kind of counterpoint, so he simply. Stares, for a moment, before taking off his mask and laying it gently beside him. 

Maybe. _Maybe,_ if he focuses, he could just….

He looks at his reflection in his phone’s screen. 

Still Allister, still _himself_ , only now his face isn’t quite as rounded, and his hands aren’t practically too small to hold his phone correctly. His eyes stay the same, he can’t imagine them any differently, but the rest changes. He thinks of Bea and Bede, and Marnie and Hop and Gloria and how much he’s envied that they get to grow up to reflect the new people they’ve become. He thinks of the way he’s wanted to look, squeezing his eyes shut and hugging Mimikyu and trying to believe that _if it’s possible, I want it to work, and I’m trying to get there._ It doesn’t change his spectral form into a fully-fledged living human body, no, but when he opens his eyes he drops his phone. 

Scrambling to put his mask back on, he finds that the eye holes don’t quite line up anymore. The strap doesn’t fit. He sets Mimikyu down, from sitting up to standing with stilted hesitation. 

When he stands, he can see further out beyond the horizon than he’d known were even there. 

Beautiful as the view is, maybe. _Maybe_ , he decides, he should start a touch shorter. Humans grow over time, after all, and he's certainly been taking his. It'll be another step forward without faceplanting into harsh reality, or, more literally, tumbling directly into the ocean. It'd probably be easier to maintain, too, getting used to holding a slightly different default form before dedicating a huge amount of energy to a totally new look. Just a _little_ shorter, a little younger than ready to be Grown Up. Teenage. 

Mimikyu beams up at him, one shadowy arm giving a thumbs-up in approval. 

He picks his mask up off the ground, nearly bowling over the side of the cliff when he realizes, in a tactile sense, that the ground is literally now further away. The world seems a lot more distant, from this angle. Then again, the stars also seem closer overhead. 

He tries to fit it on again, only to find he has to focus even more than he had on himself. It’s a process, but one that only feels as unnatural as breathing (it’s probably a good idea, when corporeal, though not spectrally necessary.) The mask gradually stretches and morphs into a new shape. A corsola design evolves into cursola. It doesn’t quite look right, the same way Allister wobbles like he’s on stilts trying to operate his own legs, awkward and unsteady, but it’s _different_. Like he’s gone and changed things for himself, at last; not who or how he is, but how he is going to cope with it.

 _“How did they possibly live like this?_ ” he asks, collapsing to the ground, then sitting up and struggling to keep from fizzling with fatigue. 

_I don’t know,_ says Mimikyu, though that’s a foregone conclusion. _But your friends might. The adult gym leaders might too, all of them had to do it. Some of them had little ones go through it._

“But when they see me… do you think it’s. It’s _too much?_ What if they don’t recognize me, or, or ask why I’m doing this now, _why didn’t I before_ I don’t _know_ what are you supposed to _say,,_ ”

_I think you should start with telling them what you told me._

"… Will you come with me?"

_Of course._

**Author's Note:**

> Yes the title comes from Mother Mother's Arms Tonite, because it is very stuck in my head, and while I have since discovered a popular alternative interpretation I'm still choosing to go with my initial impression of the lines being incredibly bitter and sardonic:
> 
> "And hey, you/  
> Don't you think it's kind of cute/  
> That I (I) died (died) right inside your arms tonight/  
> That I'm fine even after I have died"
> 
> Ah, the multiplicity of art.
> 
> The very first draft of this concept was actually about the second thing I wrote for the AU after Attachments Made Out of Light, where it was a little tab in my notes called "About Being Incorporeal and Also Other Things" so I'm a bit partial to it. 'Other things' being, primarily, that ghosts are not the only ones to be perceived in one way that people stubbornly refuse to see past in spite of your actual nature after you open up to them enough to talk about it.


End file.
